EDUCATION TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD & CHANGE IT FOR THE BETTER

​I put on the velvet jacket because it smartens up the shirt and trousers and not because I can fill the pockets with pencils, keys, phone, notes to self until I look like a walking barrel. Adding only crippling shoes and a new Director of Key Stage Three, I took to the stage at 1700 for this week’s biggest hit: Come to Tallis! It's Open Night! Embellished by 5 shiny year 7s, a cool year 10 pianist, subtle lighting and a flower arrangement half as big as me we talked to about 1200 people in five sittings. Then we gave them a map (KS3 is a geographer) set them free to wander and admire the lovely spaces and the friendly people and collect stickers, bits of clay, photos, pencils and what not. It all went very well.

I like to think that my innovative intervention early in last year’s open evening, which deftly reduced weeks of careful planning to chaos, was a useful learning experience for everyone. It certainly meant that this year’s planning was done secretly by the crack KS3 logistics team and I was kept locked in a cupboard until it was time to brush me down and stand me up. Hats off to them, though: it was a cracking evening, as far as I could see from my position chained to the piano.

I’d thought about what I was going to say and even went so far as to prepare a few slides. I talked about our 4 values (creativity, community, engagement and excellence), our Habits ( inquisitiveness, collaboration, persistence, discipline, imagination), our character (fairness, kindness, honesty, optimism and respect), our beliefs (education to understand the world and change it for the better) and the great mantra of Coe of Durham (whom I didn’t acknowledge) that children learn when they have to think really hard. I described us as a ‘blue-plaque comprehensive school’, faithful to those visionary values.

I trumpeted our sixth form results. Top 10% of all sixth forms for progress, 160 into top universities, 40 to art college, 3 into Cambridge, our 7 year education and our three year plan. And I agonised over our GCSE results, below national average last year and this, particularly in maths (a well-staffed and stable department who do well at A level). Should I talk about GCSE or flannel? Should I go into the whole thing about tiers of entry and the inflationary legacy of the past? Should I talk about what happens when you recalibrate behaviour and set a school on a long-term journey to reconsider the whole curriculum? Or should we go smartly into KS3’s pictures of children on mountain tops and teachers in fields?

We chose our character traits together last year, and honesty is one of them. I talked about GCSE as a changing picture and was clear that we need to improve. I didn’t compare us with other schools, but with our own aspirations and hoped that parents would respect our determination and optimism. I tried to be fair. A few parents wanted to talk more, afterwards, and I was frank and open. (I could hardly be anything else, handcuffed to the flower stand.)

Afterwards, I reflected on 3 comments. One was ‘you glossed over GCSE’. I didn’t, and I’ll talk to anyone about it at any length, but it’s not really what year 6 come to Open Night for. Parent Forum is the grilling arena. One was ‘do you ban mobile phones?’ No, but we confiscate them if they get annoying. A third was: ‘you’re very liberal here, aren’t you’, caused mainly by our relaxed uniform and chatty manner. In that regard, we are. Do liberal values preclude quality education? When five sittings were done and I was freed into the foyer to talk to departing folks (logistics determining that there was nothing left for me to damage) only one person wanted to talk about GCSE.

So what is the truth? Should our GCSE results (50% 5+A*-CEM) have been better? Yes. Do we know what went wrong? Yes. Can we fix it? Yes. And there is another truth, which I found myself saying, unplanned, in sittings 3, 4 and 5. It was that I’ve seen too many young people over the years with exam results driven by the perverse and shallow incentives of the performance tables, and that I want our Tallis future to be of deep learning and lifelong understanding. Perhaps I shouldn’t have said that, but it happens to be true.

Education to understand the world and change it for the better: there are no easy options.

September and teachers settle into the school halls of the land for HTs’ call to arms. I can’t speak for others, but mine was absolutely gripping. Then we remind each other of routines and expectations, spend time in departments and, whoosh, the hordes descend. Two hours bonding with the form tutor, assembly, timetables, routines and expectations then lessons start after break and we’re off. See you in 195 days. If you’re in year 7 all this is a bit of a blur. Everything is new and, while exciting, very little makes sense. Where’s the next lesson? The nearest toilet? It’s a long time since breakfast: where’s lunch? And the next lesson? What do I need for PE? How does my planner work? What’s my log-in? Which door do I go through to get to music? Really? Do I know you? Are you in my tutor group? What, registration again?

New year 12s have to seem a bit cooler. They can’t bucket about the place like turbocharged squirrels. They develop a mooch, a sort of quick saunter, and ask for advice judiciously where they can’t be overheard, all the while wondering if their chosen outfit really expresses what they intended. Some can’t quite pluck up courage to spend time in the sixth form rooms at break and still occupy the yard. The weather usually forces them indoors.

New teachers are the same. If you’re newly qualified then you expect to not know which way you’re up for a year and asking about everything is required. If you have arrived with – ahem – a position of responsibility then you worry that people expect you to be abreast of the arcane. You may know the lot about all possible A level specifications, the latest Statutory Instrument or recite pi to 4000 places but what do you if your computer’s in a huff? Where do you take a child who’s poked himself in the eye? Where exactly is the door to the library? We like to keep people on their toes at Tallis with a byzantine room numbering system. Now in my third year, I direct people with confidence. Floor, block, room number, unless you’re talking to premises staff who need you to convert your answer into algebra where x = 5. The start of the year is curtain-up on the preceding 6 months’ planning and rehearsal: recruitment, staffing, exams, cleaning and tidying, bright ideas and missives from the government. This summer, precious little on the exam results in the press (hooray hooray) but lots about academies and free schools, again. A rallying-call from the Secretary of State arrives simultaneously with Ofsted’s report on KS3, neutrally entitled ‘KS3: The Wasted Years?’ Why, thank you, Sir. I talk to a highly effective and perpetually cheerful colleague who reflects on the pace of activity as we start the year, how it takes a few days to get to peak speed, even for the best of us. Another says: we get it, we really get it, but the pace is daunting. I stop a year 8 youth who appears to have doubled in height over the summer. Perhaps his parents stand him in compost every night. He’s proud to be taller than me, but we agree that he could literally aim higher. His little mate is downcast, but it’ll come. Like growing a teenager, some things take time and can’t be forced. Schools have focused on KS4 because that’s where the national focus is. Loopholes allowed some to adapt procedures to influence outcomes without putting the leg work into learning. Now, the pressure is in a better place, but it’s still oddly expressed. If I was HMCI or the SoS – an outcome as likely as growing 6 inches over the summer, curses – this is what I’d say.

Over the last 20 years or so we were really worried that lots of young people left school without the qualifications they needed to prosper. We devised systems so that school leaders had to focus on this. We combined that with macho rhetoric about school leadership, and a hero-head cult that, in retrospect, was unfortunate. It’s taken us a while to redevelop the qualifications and performance measures to our satisfaction, but we’re very nearly done. Unfortunately, the KS4 focus of the past led pressured secondary schools to undervalue consolidating the excellent work of primary schools. Our report demonstrates this, and we are sorry. Now we intend to support schools to make KS3 the best it can be and we will inspect for this - not this year, but from September 2016.